Captive Healthscapes: Slavery, Medicine, and Natural Inquiry in Early Modern Italy

This paper explores the entanglement of slavery, medicine and natural inquiry in early modern Italy. It focuses on the healing spaces and practices that developed alongside the creation of a Bagno, a purpose built edifice that housed a large community of up to 3,000 (mostly Ottoman) slaves in the Tuscan port city of Livorno. In the early modern period, the presence of slaves in the Italian peninsula was largely related to the struggle between Ottoman and European powers for the control of Mediterranean territories. In recent years, scholars have started to shed light on the role of slavery in the economic and political strategies of early modern Italian states. However, little is known about the health-related practices and the processes of knowledge-making that were incidental to the presence of enslaved communities in the Italian territories. This paper explores how such practices and processes participated in shaping the early modern world of healing and medical and natural knowledge. On the one hand, it considers how physicians and natural inquirers were involved in maintaining and supporting the institution of slavery and relied on enslaved bodies to construct knowledge, authority, and reputation. On the other hand, it examines how Ottoman captives acted themselves as healers who provided for different constituencies, including the residents of the cities in which they were held in captivity. By interrogating the health and knowledge practices associated with the Bagno in Livorno, this paper will shed new light on the forms of encounter and conflict informing early modern healthscapes.